He is one of the very few in New York City to work out of an office built in 1891 that has a real working fireplace. Envirosell, the behavioural research and consultancy firm that Paco Underhill founded in 1977, is housed at 907 Broadway in the Flatiron District. But Underhill doesn’t spend too much time by the fireplace for he is on the road most of the time. Last year, Underhill spent 179 nights travelling — that’s more than half the year. Typically, he goes around the world three or four times in a year. An American raised in Asia, he has lived in a multitude of cities as his father was a diplomat. Underhill confesses, “If I am in New York for too long, I feel like a sailor on the beach. I just need to move.” At 63, Underhill enjoys every bit of what he does including his travel and would like this to go on for as many more years as possible. As a retail consultancy specialist, Underhill is better known for his two books, Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping and What Women Want, which focuses on how the changing status of women affects the physical world we live in. To read the full interview, you can purchase a digital copy of Masterspeakhere

You can read the first edition of Masterspeak that was published in 2013. Some of the world’s finest thinkers offer their insights, advice and food for further thought in this Collector’s Issue